You’ve got to tell yourself, unless this image will add to understanding in a predictable way, it doesn’t belong in the slidedeck. There are very few neutral design elements. Those pictures either hurt or help.

2. You have the same text on-screen that you’ll (presumably) speak aloud.

Research has concluded that this also obstructs understanding and, from personal experience, I find myself very distracted by the slight differences between what the presenter says versus what’s written on the board.

I think that asking those questions aloud over a black screen or over a screen with the presentation title on it would by dynamite. Compelling, thought-provoking stuff.

My knee-jerk approach here would be to design handouts so that teachers could sketch down responses to these questions as they came in, while waiting for the presentation to start.

OK, you might have to walk me through this one, as I am somewhat design-hindered, but I am willing to spend the time.

Let me state the initial intention of the slides: I want to introduce the teachers to the idea of how our classrooms are changing, as well as our profession.

The presentation of these slides to the teachers present will include very little if any speaking on my part. The plan on my part was to ask the questions before the wiki is shown on the screen. Then we would listen to the audio or read the text from the various participants. The workshop is set up so that there is a brief time to show, then lots of time to play with whatever we showed.

Would you suggest doing the all black, or title only presentation before showing the Voicethread, or just scrapping the Voicethread entirely? I hesitate their, not for the sacking of our precious tech, but for the loss of the possible opinions that might come through from the people I asked to contribute.

So those three slides comprise the entire “slideshow”? You use those to intro the conversation and then the rest of the slideshow is whatever people around the Internet contribute to it plus some demo-time after that?

I mean, if that’s the case, it makes sense to keep the text. I’d advocate pushing the text to the foreground and either minimizing the pictures, which I still think are kind of clip-artish in how they dress up the questions without doing much to clarify or answer them, or losing them entirely.

The entire presentation is done using two screens, one in which a wiki is displayed (where the voicethread will be along with other video resources and text) and one with a bunch of slides designed in a very simple manner with limited text. A tablet PC will be used for the slides, and a mac for the wiki and video.

I will have to take a look at the setup of Voicethread, but I don’t know if I can swap out the pics at this point without losing the audio from Lehmann, which I really like.

Pass along one of your faves for me to examine, if you don’t mind. I’d like to see some examples.

Been pondering all weekend what to say. I strongly recommend that you listen to my first voicethread before playing it to the teachers (as it might not fit what you want to do!) – the other voicethreads are fine.

Boy — I found using the voice thread hard — which is amazing as I am a podcaster. Looking forward to hearing/reading the responses from your teachers — would love them to send me their thoughts on the different topics.